Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process, and: The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (review)

Musical theatre scholars have been waging a war on academia for some time, as they've struggled to legitimize the serious study of their art form. The dearth, until recently, of rigorous academic texts dedicated to the history and analysis of musical theatre served to strengthen the case that musical theatre, while entertaining and popular, was not worthy of in-depth consideration on college campuses. As Raymond Knapp says in the preface to his engaging new text The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, "American musicals do not lack advocates, but they do lack effective advocacy within the academy" (xvii). In Knapp, and Bruce Kirle, author of the fascinating Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process, it seems that musicals finally have found the effective academic advocates they so desperately needed. In fact, the new texts by Kirle and Knapp reveal that musicals are densely layered and richly rewarding sources of study that have earned their rightful place in the academy. These careful scholarly studies are especially noteworthy because they seem to indicate a coming of age in musical theatere scholarship. They sing out their good news that the study of Broadway musicals is no longer confined to the realm of coffee table books with glorious pictures or encyclopedic historical chronologies that offer little, if any, scholarly analysis. Instead, Kirle, a professional musical director and a lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and Knapp, a professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, offer very different but equally mature examinations of musicals that employ a variety of theoretical lenses to focus attention on the cultural, historical, and even musicological impacts of American musicals.

While their subject matter is very similar, the texts by Kirle and Knapp vary dramatically in their approach, and even in their stated goals. In his preface, Kirle says that he created Unfinished Show Business because of his "distrust of linear, text-based historiographical approaches to the Broadway musical" (xv). He positions his book as an alternative to chronologically ordered, encyclopedic musical theatre histories that privilege the so-called "integrated" musical—a term which generally refers to musicals which use singing, dancing, and acting to advance the plot, and which are normally considered to begin with Rodgers and Hammerstein's masterpiece, Oklahoma! Knapp, a musicologist, notes that his text would most likely find a home as a textbook in a music history course and privileges musical analysis in his text because, he states, "it is above all else its treatment of music that defines the American musical" (15). Thus, Kirle's book, which focuses its attention on musicals as uniquely unfinished products that require the input of all of the creative artists involved (not just the composer and / or lyricist) to stabilize their ever-changing identity, seems to be on a mission to replace the current texts used in a musical theatre history course, while Knapp's text, which places the composer and lyricist—and even more specifically, their particular songs—at its center, is striving to create an ideal text for a music history course. Of special note, and in keeping with Knapp's focus on music, is that he has found an efficient, technology-based way to let readers hear the musical examples he discusses in his book. Readers can listen to the portions of songs Knapp analyzes by accessing the website included at the front of the text and run through UCLA, where Knapp teaches. Numbered musical symbols in the text detail where examples are relevant and provide a useful guide for navigating the very user-friendly site. The listening component makes Knapp's tome...